VANDALS DEFACE NEW HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL

William Recktenwald and Cheryl DevallCHICAGO TRIBUNE

People milled around the Skokie village green all Monday, touching the monument, standing back, then shaking their heads in shock and disbelief.

The bronze sculpture of a Jewish resistance fighter, a mother holding her slain child and a little boy clinging to an elderly rabbi--the monument to the Holocaust dead the village had dedicated the day before--had been spray-painted overnight with silver swastikas and the words ''Liars'' and ''Jews Lie.''

Tema Bauer, who lost her right arm in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, made the visit with her husband, Morris.

''How can this happen? How can this happen in a free country?'' she asked. ''We were here all together yesterday, and now, this.''

Skokie had taken particular pride in its Holocaust memorial, and many of its residents now felt particular anguish at its desecration. Village officials estimate 7,000 of Skokie`s 69,000 residents lived through the Nazis` war against the Jews that cost 6 million lives in World War II. Holocaust survivors and their relatives made up the majority of Sunday`s dedication audience.

People of many ages and religions stopped by the monument Monday. Some had been there the day before. Others visited for the first time and were unaware of the defacing until they got there.

As morning radio broadcasts carried news of the vandalism, the stream of people swelled.

By evening, it had not ended.

The monument`s sculptor, Ed Chesney, was just turning his van into the village library parking lot when he saw the paint on the statue he had spent the past year creating.

''I didn`t believe it,'' said Chesney, 65, of Detroit. ''I had planned a morning of photo-taking. Inside, I am just torn apart. I didn`t cry, but it is like giving birth to a child. It took an entire year. And to see what has been done to it, it makes me sick.''

Chesney took a can of paste wax and a ladder from his van and climbed high atop the memorial to begin removing some of the paint.

But he stopped after several onlookers told him not to remove the paint, suggesting the symbols should remain for at least a day to remind others anti- Semitism exists in the United States.

''Let the people know that we have Nazis right here,'' said Avram Szwajger, president of Sheerit Hapleitah (Remnant of the Holocaust), the Chicago-area Holocaust survivors` organization that raised $150,000 for the monument.

''This is nothing new to us,'' Szwajger said. ''We have seen it in Europe.''

Harvey Schiller, another Skokie resident, said, ''I think they should leave it for a few days. Otherwise, people will say it really did not happen. I want to bring my children here to see this, so they`ll know these things can happen.''

But Skokie Mayor Albert J. Smith pledged the paint will be cleaned off

''as quickly as possible.

''Everything that we have learned about this type of event says we should clean it up as quickly as possible,'' he told several dozen people near the monument.

A local industrial cleaning firm had volunteered to do the job without charge, Smith said.

He ordered a public-works crew to install a temporary lamppost near the statue, and, after a meeting Monday afternoon with village officials, Smith said engineers would study permanent floodlighting and other security measures for the monument.

The mayor, a Roman Catholic who had been praised Sunday for his opposition to a planned neo-Nazi march on the green in 1978, was visibly shaken by the overnight events.

''We are talking about a couple of idiots, a couple of punks who come out only in the middle of the night,'' Smith said. ''Look what happened yesterday. It was a beautiful brotherhood. What happened overnight was terrible.''

Police said vandals sprayed the statue and its black marble base between 4 a.m. and 6:15 a.m. Monday.

The entire Skokie police force had been on duty during the dedication, and the monument area had been patroled regularly by car Sunday night and Monday morning, said Officer Ron Baran of the department`s crime-prevention unit.

Still, he said, vandals ''had plenty of cover from the trees and bushes around the statue.'' A police officer was the first to discover the graffiti, Baran said.

No suspects had been found, Baran said, and no one had called the police to threaten the action or to claim responsibility for it afterward.

A $1,000 reward for information leading to an arrest was offered by the American Jewish Committee, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago and the Church Federation of Greater Chicago.

The Skokie incident occurred after a year in which anti-Semitic vandalism had declined in the Chicago area, according to the Anti-Defamation League of B`nai B`rith. In 1986, there had been 14 reported episodes of vandalism targeted against Jews, while in 1985 there were 23 in the area, the organization said.

Bert Gast, an Evanston artist who drew the original sketches for the monument, said he believes the defacing was inevitable. ''It`s not surprising that it happened, only that it happened so soon,'' Gast, 62, said.

That it happened at all reminded the village`s Holocaust survivors their pain will never completely go away.

''I am not a violent man,'' said Leo Schneiderman, 65, a retired tailor who came to the U.S. after he was liberated from a Nazi death camp in Austria. ''I have never hurt anyone in my life. But if I could find the person who did this, I would smash his skull in.''

Ilse Weinberg, who is married to a Holocaust survivor, was going to the Skokie village hall on other business Monday morning when she came upon the memorial. She stopped in shock and, in tears, said aloud to nobody in particular, ''This is sick. I hope they`re proud of themselves, those goddamn cowards.''